Ages ago, I mentioned that we had an ice cream maker. As I foresaw, it does not get a lot of use, except for making sorbets and similar interesting frozen treats. I also posted an image of our freezer chock-full of ice cream a while ago, but I can’t find it to post a link so too bad.

Instead, we have chosen to fill our freezer with 42 Paddle Pops, 10 Mini Calippos and 3 fancy 2-litre tubs of ice cream. 20 of the Paddle Pops were purchased for someone so they don’t necessarily count, but that’s still a lot of ice cream.

It’s no coincidence that the amount of ice cream in our freezer came a couple of days after receiving a leaflet advertising a local Streets factory outlet about 15 minutes away. We’d known of it’s existance but had never stopped by before.

Unfortunately the 16-Paddle-Pops-for-3-bucks deal was no longer available so we had to make do as best we could. 25 bucks and more than eight litres of ice cream later… yeah we did OK.

Since Justine’s birthday is coming up soon (along with mine, my Dad’s, and Justine’s Dad’s), I thought it was time to get her the present I’d been planning on getting… her. Because I usually get badgered around present-time until I tell her what she’s getting, Justine already knew she was getting an ice cream maker (ours is a Breville, but appears to be the same model).

The machines are sort of dodgy, except for the really expensive (i.e. $500+) ones. Basically, they consist of a big bowl that you put in the freezer, and a churning attachment. Once the big bowl is frozen, you pour the pre-made ice cream mix (that you make yourself, from real ingredients; it’s not a packet mix) into the cold bowl as it’s churning. Even then, the only real difference with the expensive ones is that they have a freezer unit inside them instead of the bowl you put in your freezer.

And since we couldn’t wait until June 9, we decided to make ice cream yesterday. Well, I decided to make ice cream yesterday.

I made some lemon sorbet using some lemons from the tree in our back yard and some strawberry ice cream using strawberries from … the store. The lemon sorbet turned out pretty well, except that it was quite a lot sweeter than we’d anticipated. Next time we’ll use a lot less sugar (1.5 cups in 1 litre). The strawberry ice cream turned out really well though. Perhaps a little too egg-yolky flavoured but otherwise really nice.

Hopefully it will cut down our ice cream costs, which seem to soar into the thousands every year.